Monday, November 7, 2016

On
perusing over again Debord's Society
of the Spectacle
I was nearly alarmed to find how very much more pertinent its
insights are into present-day society than perhaps ever before. Now,
confessed, I am not a Situationist of any stripe, nor desire in the
least to be associated with Debord's writings outside of being their
occasional reader. Yet and still, if only I accept a bit of the gist
of Debord's book: that media has become the ruling force in society,
and so on; quite a few new developments in contemporary society
become thrown into a powerful new light.

The
waning of “mass media” today in 2016, and the innovations of
social media concurrent with this long, slow demise of said “one-way”
streams of social data---well, in very brief, they suggest something
akin to an actualization of the hope for a renewal of social justice
so dearly clung to by the prophetic tradition (including not only
religious movements, but so many secular ones). If, and this is taken
in a very abstracted (but not unreal) way, the mediation of ideology
in society has permutated: from mass industrial media to social
postindustrial media; then, very obviously, something is afoot, or
unraveling, presently that may prove to have farther reaching
outcomes in the future than we now commonly recognize.

Further,
if postindustrialism is a significantly different mode of production
(in the standard Marxist analytic) from industrialism---which I
believe becomes quite obvious also when held to the least bit of
scrutiny---then wherever this shift in productive modes has occurred,
there is to be predicted a delayed reconstitution of the entire array
of superstructures in these societies where said mutation has
occurred. I do not pretend to give my audience any least extensive
nor rigorous proofs of this evolution in the global status of modes of
production, but ask you merely to put my thesis to the test of any
and every your own methods of falsification.

And
the question hereafter is not: what is to be expected? So much as it
is: how is this happening at present? I have little enough energy to
dilate out a response to this latter question---and feel, further,
that if only I have planted the merest scattering of seeds of this
problematic at all my task is complete.